Probably not new to many people, but I found this and thought it was worth a mention. Haven’t tried it yet…
http://frankbitterlich.gotdns.com/article.php?story=2004072218222147
http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/gallery/
How about this for ASCII art. it is an ascii gfx library. There is a demo for called bb. Really cool and extremely realistic (realtime 3D and raytracing with ascii!)
BB URL (binary for dos and source for linux)
http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/bb/
- How about a render engine for Blender?
- Orthodox asciiart uses only English characters+numbers+punctuations. In China (China mainland and our Taiwan province), we also use Chinese Characters. Here are some asciiart works which have been converted to PNG, but sorry for Chinese Characters on some of the pictures. It is a pity that no animation (no they are not in the style of the famous Matrix bullet time) has been translated into GIF.
http://www.ansiart.org/A_pic.aspx?fid=192
http://www.ansiart.org/A_pic.aspx?fid=5026
http://www.ansiart.org/A_pic.aspx?fid=5036
for more asciiart in pictures, http://www.ansiart.org/a_list.aspx
I’m doing something simular but different. I do it in my sparetime like when I have 10 minutes or so on my work or else behind a pc. PixelArt 
really cool and most of the time painting 3D (isometric style pixelart) Using pixel per pixel painting. 